- And I witnessed how he structures
all of the training from everyone from pros...
And that is going to be your fastest possible time.
Who trained 12 hours a week,
and he went sub-nine hours in Kona.
Focus please.
Morning, trainiacs.
As you may know, if you've been around for the last week,
I was just in Scottsdale and Tempe,
and a big chunk of what I was doing down there was
I was meeting with Matt Dixon
and the Purple Patch Pro Triathlon Team,
and I witnessed how he structures
all of the training from everyone from pros to age groupers.
And I think that there is something that's really important
about Matt's approach, as he calls it, methodology.
- Uniting behind a methodology,
a methodology, a methodology, a methodology.
- Just sounds nice when he says it.
That all age groupers need to hear because it means,
potentially, training less while getting faster.
I'm also taking up wearing a hat backwards.
So I'm gonna put this in all terrain terms here,
and I'm probably gonna paraphrase and butcher
a lot of what Matt Dixon says.
If you're very interested
in Matt Dixon's approach after hearing this,
go to Amazon, check out The Well-Built Triathlete
and The Fast-Track Triathlete.
Those are two books that Matt has come out with
over the last three-four years.
So now, in my words, what I gathered from Matt is that
the training approach for every triathlete
needs to match their lifestyle.
And why that is, is because our bodies
can't differentiate stress that comes from work
or stress that comes from training.
And because most of us age groupers
have very stressful jobs
and we tend to have family structures where
triathlon is not integrated into the family,
any time that we do triathlon training
is often taking away and adding to the difficulty
of fitting in all of real life.
And because pros structure their entire lives
around the training,
we can't expect to be putting in
the same amounts of physical stress hours
in the triathlon training that pros do.
And that's because, in the case of pros,
they have more time to rest, they have more time to recover,
they have more time to put their feet up.
So, often when people say,
"Hey, how much training is it gonna take
"to get to Kona?" for example,
the typical answer is anywhere in between 18
and 22 hours a week of training.
That's what we see pros doing.
But when you ask people,
do you have 18 to 20 hours a week to train?
Rarely does anyone actually have that.
Pros do.
20 hours a week from an age grouper
doesn't have the same effect because
we spend that 20 hours a week training
and then we go and work 40, 50, 60 hours on top of it.
Then in the evening we have to cart our families around,
we have to go to events.
There is a whole lot more that goes into it.
So what happens with the pro
is that they're able to absorb
that 20 hours a week of training,
whereas with the age grouper, it might be too much.
So it's not like 20 hours a week is just 20 hours a week.
For every single athlete,
there is a certain amount
of training time and training stress
that they can put themselves through
over the course of a week that is comfortable enough
to absorb the training.
And that's different for everyone and dependent
on your lifestyle and your body's ability to recover.
So instead of trying to cram everyone's life
regardless of what commitments they have
into a maximum training effort week,
what we're looking to do is figure out how much training
you can comfortably sustain and recover from,
and that is going to be your fastest possible time.
Beyond that, you're probably doing yourself damage.
So how do you figure out
how much time you can spend training?
First thing is that you've got to tally up
the non-negotiables.
That's time spent working, time spent commuting,
time with commitments to family,
and at least seven to eight hours of sleep per night.
Also, then build in a little bit of me-time, essentially.
An hour, maybe two hours every day
where you're not rushing from one thing to the next because
even if you can fit everything in
but you're rushing from one thing to the next,
it's just constant stress on your body
and you need a little bit of downtime throughout the day.
And then what you do is
you build your triathlon training plan around that,
not the other way around.
And if it turns out that 12 hours is
all that you can comfortably get in,
12 hours is going to be your optimal performance
training hours week.
And what Matt also does
in addition to figuring out your optimal amount of time
is he understands that things come up.
So over the course of a week,
let's say there's 10 workouts in a week,
he'll indicate which workouts are key workouts.
These are typically the biggest, the longest,
the most difficult training workouts.
And then the other workouts are the supporting workouts.
These are the technique workouts.
Runners might refer to these as garbage miles,
recovery workouts.
Now, if you need to steal a day
because you're running out of time
or if you need to just shorten up a workout,
you do that with these recovery workouts,
either dropping them or
dropping aspects of it to shorten the workout
so that you can still get those key,
most beneficial workouts in.
So do pros train upwards of 20 or more hours a week?
Yes.
Will training 20 hours a week
help you more than training 12 hours a week?
Yes, but only if your life is set up
to be able to comfortably train 20 hours a week.
And does it mean that if you
aren't able to train 20 hours a week
that you can't reach your dreams like go to Kona?
No, there's actually a couple of case studies,
very famous ones, where Matt has coached athletes,
one in particular named Sami Inkinen,
who trained 12 hours a week,
and he went sub-nine hours in Kona.
Now, granted, Sami was an incredible youth athlete
and he had a huge engine to begin with,
but it's just to say
that you can reach your peak level of fitness
for your lifestyle on less training than the
gold standard 20-hour training weeks
that people have come to think is the norm.
So you go, triathletes.
If you aren't yet subscribed,
hit that subscribe button below
to catch our daily triathlon videos.
If you want to see a lot of the coverage that we did
with Matt and his pro Purple Patch Team,
check out those videos up here.
If you are an existing trainiac, (jingling)
and if you are an existing trainiac,
if you got any questions, (jingling)
and if you are an existing trainiac,
if you got any questions about this,
ask them in the comments below.
See you.
Backwards hat.
Ooh, ow, ow, ow.
That hurts, ow! Ooh.